The Joy of Silent Film

The success of “The Artist” has renewed an interest in silent films; for me, the most profound pleasure of that film was its playfulness. Silence turns the experience of film-going into a pure game of hide and seek, a sort of exhilarating scavenger hunt in which the mind’s eye surfs the image looking for clues to personality, absorbing atmospheres, savoring shapes, making thematic connections. Silence pulls you into the image rather like Alice down the rabbit hole. By contrast, with sound, the image comes to you. Silence invigorates the imagination; sound decorates it.

The other night, out of curiosity, I went to Film Forum to see Marion Davies in “Show People” (1928), a fascinating silent film which spoofs Hollywood filmmaking and which follows a narrative trajectory similar to the “The Artist”: a pretty, ambitious girl comes to Hollywood, bluffs her way onto a comedy set, finds success, loses love to success, and re-finds it. In between, the romp abounds with pratfalls, pie-faces, and car chases, while incidentally including in its backstage story some of giants of the silent screen who turn up for cameo laughs, among them the craggy William S. Hart, the suntanned Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., the urbane John Gilbert, and the pint-sized Charlie Chaplin. Davies, who was a Ziegfeld Girl before she hit Hollywood in 1916, didn’t just have the fortune of a face; as the lover of William Randolph Hearst, she had the fortune of a fortune. She’s a high-spirited comedienne; her film (she produced it) picks up her off-stage argument with her husband, who preferred to see her in high-tone, serious vehicles not playing for laughs. Here Davies satirizes the high-art pretention of Gloria Swanson (mugging in her manner) and lets comedy conquer all. At one point, down a country lane, there is even a cavalcade of clown grotesques: policemen hopping down the road like jumping beans, men in barrels, men tottering and tumbling on stilts.

Clowning, it seems to me, is where silent film is at its most playful and its most poetic. Nowadays, we talk of “standup” comedy, a phrase that indicates by its very description how frozen the body has become; entertainers are now “talking heads.” Silent films celebrated the poetry of motion. Silent film elevated the kinetic to metaphor. “I was alien to the slick tempo,” Chaplin wrote of his first trip to America in 1910. “In New York even the owner of the smallest enterprise acts with alacrity…. The soda jerk, when serving an egg malted milk, performs like a hopped up juggler.” The silent clowning—Chaplin’s especially—turned the exhausting American momentum into fun.

The Mack Sennett car chase took Western mobility and revved it up to the speed of the combustion engine. In one violent gesture, the pratfall condensed the culture’s dynamism and panic. Silence allowed action to take on the astonishment and zaniness of a dream. “When we started making features,” Buster Keaton said of his transition to talkies, “we had to stop doing the impossible.” Keaton jumped through a window into a dress; Chaplin waited tables on roller skates; W. C. Fields juggled twenty-five cigar boxes. Silent-film clowning epitomized the resourcefulness of the actor. “Don’t anticipate,” King Vidor—yes, he’s onscreen too—tells the rookie Davies in “Show People.” Improvisation was the name of the silent-film game. Sound may have recorded the known world, but silent high jinks took it into the unknown.